Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to optofluidic microscopes devices (OFMs) and OFM systems. More specifically, certain embodiments relate to super resolution optofluidic microscope (SROFMs) for subpixel resolution, two-dimensional and three-dimensional imaging.
The miniaturization of biomedical imaging tools has the potential to vastly change methods of medical diagnoses and scientific research. More specifically, compact, low-cost microscopes could significantly extend affordable healthcare diagnostics and provide a means for examining and automatically characterizing a large number of cells, as discussed in Psaltis, D., et al., “Developing optofluidic technology through the fusion of microfluidics and optics,” Nature, Vol. 442, pp. 27, s.1. (2006), which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety for all purposes.
Conventional optical microscopes have bulky optics, and have proven to be expensive and difficult to miniaturize. Recent developments in microfluidic technology offer optofluidic microscopes (OFMs) which have been proven to be low cost, compact devices with the high throughput provided by microfluidics. An example of a conventional OFM can be found in Cui, Xiquan, et al., “Lensless high-resolution on-chip optofluidic microscopes for Caenorhabditis elegans and cell imaging,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Vol. 105, p. 10670 (2008), which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety for all purposes. However, conventional OFMs rely on an aperture array or a photosensor array diagonally extending across the fluid channel to acquire images as object(s) move across the array. Thus, acquisition time in conventional OFMs depends on how long it takes the object to move across the array. Also, image resolution in many conventional OFMs was limited.